Saturday, September 30, 2017

This
is what the White House wants in exchange for saving Dreamers from deportation

By
Anita Kumar, McClatchy DC Bureau

September
26, 2017

WASHINGTON
The White House is expected to ask Congress to approve a Republican wish list
of

immigration policies as part of a deal to protect hundreds of thousands of
young people brought into the country illegally as children, known as Dreamers,
according to a preliminary document obtained by McClatchy.

Talking
points written by the president’s Domestic Policy Council and given to some
members of the conservative Freedom Caucus on Capitol Hill include a dozen
proposals grouped into three broad areas — border security, interior
enforcement and merit-based immigration.[…]

The
acting Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security said on Wednesday that
sensitive information about Dreamers could soon be handed over to federal
deportation forces.

Under
questioning from Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), DHS Secretary Elaine Duke said
she could not guarantee a promise made by the Obama administration to those who
registered with the DACA program—known as Deferred Actions for Childhood
Arrivals.[…]

Oakland, Calif. — Young migrants from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador
come to this country fleeing violence and lives that are often dictated by
savage gangs. It’s expensive to get here. They often arrive with thousands of
dollars of high-interest debt and little or no English skills. And they face an
administration that insists that they are gangsters bringing bloodshed and gang
warfare to American cities.

In
fact, these young people are often fleeing gangs. And the challenges they face
in the United States make them particularly vulnerable for recruitment into the
same violent gangs they left home to escape.[…]

Friday, September 29, 2017

This
year, from November 10-12, Witness for Peace
staff, along with human rights activists, torture survivors, anti-war veterans,
students, families, union workers, artists, and educators will converge in
Eloy-Tucson-Ambos Nogales for the SOA Watch Border Encuentro. Register for the Encuentro HERE!

We
hope you'll join us and our partners SOA Watch for three days of vigils,
workshops, rallies (including at the Mexico-US border), music, and other
collaboration to deepen the resistance against US-led militarism and other
harmful policies throughout the Western Hemisphere.

WFP
will be hosting a happy hour, to connect with our teams from around Latin
America, meet our grassroots organizers from across the US, and learn more
about our work on both sides of the border. Join us on Saturday,
November 11th from 5:30 to 6:30 PM at the Quality Hotel
Americana in Nogales, Arizona:639 N Grand Ave, Nogales, AZ, 85621.

Here's
just one of the speakers (a partner of both WFP & SOAW) who'll present at
the Encuentro:

Since
2014, Gaspar Sánchez has served on COPINH's
leadership team as the Sexual Diversity & Rights Equality Coordinator.
COPINH (Civic Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras) is
the first Indigenous organization in Latin America to establish LGBTQI+ issues
as a pillar of its work. Gaspar is a popular educator who works to shape the
next generation of young Indigenous leadership, and serves as a spiritual guide
for the Lenca people in their collective efforts to recuperate historical
memory through the processes of life, land defense, and ancestral practices.
Gaspar has represented COPINH all over the world: from Mexico, Cuba, Venezuela,
and Brazil, to the United States and the United Nations. He will be on tour
throughout the US this fall--including with WFP in the Great Lakes, Midwest, and New England regions.

Thursday, September 28, 2017

Talia
Inlender, a senior staff attorney at Public Counsel, which advocates for
immigrants, criticized the focus on sanctuary cities. “It’s clearly a political
move that is not actually geared toward public safety,” she said.

By Joel
Rubin, Los Angeles Times

September
17, 2017

Immigration
officials on Thursday announced hundreds of arrests in an operation targeting
communities where police and elected officials have refused to fully cooperate
on enforcing federal immigration laws.

ICE
said it arrested 167 people in and around Los Angeles, a region in which
several cities and counties have been tagged by justice officials as being
so-called sanctuaries — a loosely defined term used to describe local
governments that restrict police from assisting immigration authorities
identify and detain people suspected of being in the country illegally.

Arrests
were also made in San Francisco and San Jose. Overall, ICE said it arrested
nearly 500 people across the country over the last few days.[...]

Congresswoman
and Leader of the Democrats in the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi,
looked genuinely surprised when a group of dreamers took over her press
conference. They demanded that Pelosi and the Democrats stop using the dreamers
as a bargaining chip in a deal with Trump that would win security for the
dreamers but seal the fate of their parents and the eleven million
undocumented.

The
Congresswoman should not have been surprised. The Dream Act has long been used
by many Democrats – and some Republicans – to sidestep the popular demand to
stop the deportations of the families. For years we heard Democrats say that
“the dreamers, unlike their parents, did not “knowingly” cross the border
because they were too young when their parents brought them.”[...]

For
three years now, incarcerated immigrants have staged hunger strikes and work
stoppages to protest conditions at the Northwest Detention Center, an
immigration jail in Tacoma, Washington, run by a private prison company that
pays detainees as little as $1 a day to work in the jail.

"This
week folks were offered chips or a soup for several nights of waxing the
floors, so not even $1 [per] day," one person incarcerated in the jail
recently reported to NWDC Resistance, an immigrant-led group fighting to end
the deportation and detention of immigrants.

Five
hunger strikes have been held so far this year, with participants and
whistleblowers facing solitary confinement, threats of forced feeding and other
forms of retaliation from prison authorities, according to NWDC Resistance.

Their
efforts paid off on Wednesday when Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson
announced a lawsuit against GEO Group, a massive private prison firm that runs
the Northwest Detention Center under a federal contract.[…]

WASHINGTON
— Trump administration officials, under pressure from the White House to
provide a rationale for reducing the number of refugees allowed into the United
States next year, rejected a study by the Department of Health and Human
Services that found that refugees brought in $63 billion more in government
revenues over the past decade than they cost.

Photo: James Lawler Duggan/Reuters

The
draft report, which was obtained by The New York Times, contradicts a central
argument made by advocates of deep cuts in refugee totals as President Trump
faces an Oct. 1 deadline to decide on an allowable number. The issue has
sparked intense debate within his administration as opponents of the program,
led by Mr. Trump’s chief policy adviser, Stephen Miller, assert that continuing
to welcome refugees is too costly and raises concerns about terrorism.[…]

A
poll of more than 20,000 people in 18 countries, conducted by GlobeScan for the
BBC World Service from December 2015 through April 2016, found that 51 percent
of respondents saw themselves more as global citizens than as citizens of their
own countries.

By
Lawrence Wittner, History News Network

September 17, 2017

Has
nationalism captured the hearts and minds of the world’s people?

It
certainly seems to have emerged as a powerful force in recent years. Trumpeting
their alleged national superiority and hatred of foreigners, political parties
on the far right have made their biggest political advances since the 1930s.
After the far right’s startling success, in June 2016, in getting a majority of
British voters to endorse Brexit―British withdrawal from the European Union
(EU)―even mainstream conservative parties began to adopt a chauvinist approach.
Using her Conservative Party conference to rally support for leaving the EU,
British Prime Minister Theresa May declared contemptuously: “If you believe you
are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere.”[…]

Wednesday, September 20, 2017

Immigration
and Customs Enforcement agents continue to detain immigrants in New York City
courthouses. Go here
for an earlier report.—TPOI editor

ICE
Agents Make Arrests at Brooklyn Courthouse

Democracy
Now!

September
15, 2017

In
New York City, plainclothes ICE agents arrested four undocumented immigrants at
a Brooklyn

Photo: Cameron Mease/Brooklyn Defender Services

criminal court building Thursday morning, in an unusual move
targeting a courthouse for immigration enforcement. An ICE spokesperson later
confirmed the arrests, saying the four men were suspected of gang activity. ICE
policy prevents officers from making arrests at sensitive locations like
schools, hospitals and places of worship, without approval from supervisors.
Courthouses are not included on the list, but the practice is unusual and has
been criticized by prosecutors, police and defense attorneys.

This
is Katherine Poor of the Legal Aid Society: "It makes people very scared
when they hear things like this happening, because they are told by the court
that they have to return for their court dates. That’s something that they are
ordered to do, and if they don’t do it, a warrant can be issued for their
arrest. On the other hand, if people hear that there is ICE coming into the courthouse,
if there’s ICE coming outside of the courthouse, and they have fear for their
own immigration situation, that puts people in a very, very difficult
position."

ICE
agents dressed in plainclothes staked out a courthouse in Brooklyn and refused
to identify themselves.

By
Leon Neyfakh, Slate

September 15, 2017

Cameron
Mease, a senior staff attorney with Brooklyn Defender Services, was walking in
downtown Brooklyn, New York, on Thursday morning when he saw a group of six or
seven men shove someone against a fence, put him in handcuffs, and drag him
into an unmarked van. The men were dressed in jeans and T-shirts. Given their
behavior and attire, a passerby would’ve had good reason to think he’d just
witnessed a kidnapping.

But
Mease had seen such scenes unfold before, and he was pretty sure he knew what
he’d just seen. He believed these were plainclothes agents from Immigration and
Customs Enforcement and that they’d come to the Brooklyn courthouse to take
someone into custody who they knew would be there for a court date.[…]

Federal
Immigration Officials Will Continue Nabbing Suspects at New York Courthouses to
Subvert Sanctuary City Status

By
Linley Sanders, Newsweek

September 15, 2017

Federal
immigration officers in New York doubled-down on arresting undocumented
immigrants as they make appearances at courthouses this week—a decision that
the local district attorney says is an "outrageous" tactic that
"sends a chilling effect" and "undermines public safety."

Defying
New York's status as a "sanctuary city" for undocumented immigrants,
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), officers aggressively snatched four
men outside a criminal court building in Brooklyn on Thursday.

“This
was the most visible they’ve ever been,” Scott Hechinger, an attorney with the
Brooklyn Defender Service, which provides legal representation to individuals
who cannot afford a lawyer, told Newsweek. “It’s the most brazen that we’ve
seen them be.”[…]

Tuesday, September 19, 2017

Organized
labor is finding creative ways to protect immigrant members and families
vulnerable in the Trump era.

By
Dave Jamieson, Huffington Post

September
12, 2018

Yahaira
Burgos was fearing the worst when her husband, Juan Vivares, reported to the
Immigration and Customs Enforcement office in lower Manhattan in March.
Vivares, who fled Colombia and entered the U.S. illegally in 2011, had recently
been given a deportation order. Rather than hide, he showed up at the ICE office
with Burgos and his lawyer to continue to press his case for asylum.

Vivares,
29, was detained for deportation. That’s when Burgos’ union sprang into action.

Prepared
for Vivares’ detention, members of the Service Employees International Union
Local 32BJ gathered for a rally outside the ICE office that afternoon,
demanding his release. Union leadership appealed to New York’s congressional
delegation, enlisting Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D) to reach out to
ICE leadership. The union president even disseminated the name and phone number
for the ICE officer handling Vivares’ deportation and urged allies to call him
directly.[…]

Monday, September 18, 2017

President
Trump had dinner with Democratic Congressional leaders Senator Chuck Schumer
(NY) and Representative Nancy Pelosi (CA) the evening of September 13.
Afterwards the two Democrats issued a statement saying they’d made
a deal with Trump to protect the nearly 800,000 young immigrants currently
enrolled in President Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA)
program, which the Trump administration is terminating as of next March. “We
agreed to enshrine the protections of DACA into law quickly, and to work out a
package of border security, excluding the wall, that’s acceptable to both
sides,” Schumer and Pelosi wrote.

As
has been usual with this administration, the next day the president contradicted himself several times, but in the end it appeared that Trump and
the Democrats had at least made, as Republican senator John Cornyn (TX) put it, “a
deal to make a deal.” So passage of a new law to protect young undocumented
immigrants is possible, although far from certain.

What Would Be Traded
Off?

To steer such a law through Congress the Democrats would need to make compromises in order to get enough Republicans legislators on board.

On
September 14 the National Review published an
article outlining a mainstream Republican negotiating position for
possible talks. The author, National Review deputy managing editor
Robert VerBruggen, isn’t especially interested in increased border security.
Instead, he wants Republicans to push for an expansion of the E-Verify program,
through which employers use an online connection to government data bases to check the legal status of new hires. Making E-Verify mandatory for all
private employers should be non-negotiable, VerBruggen writes. And he insists
that if DACA recipients are given access to legal status or citizenship, they
should be barred from applying for green cards for their parents. Finally, he
wants changes to legal immigration, moving away from the current priority for family
unification toward greater emphasis on bringing in highly skilled workers.
(Although he doesn’t mention it, this would not only add valuable technical
workers to the U.S. work pool—it would also lure them away from other countries
that might be economic rivals.)

How much of this would the Democrats accept? Many
of them already back mandatory E-Verify. It’s true that Chuck Schumer has
objections to the program—but only because he wants something tougher. In a
2010 Washington
Post op-ed, he and Republican
senator Lindsey Graham (SC) called for a biometric Social Security card. “Prospective employers would be
responsible for swiping the cards through a machine to confirm a person's
identity and immigration status,” Schumer and Graham explained. “Employers who
refused to swipe the card or who otherwise knowingly hired unauthorized workers
would face stiff fines and, for repeat offenses, prison sentences.”

Will the Democrats Cave?

The
Democrats don’t actually have a good record on helping youthful immigrants like
the DACA recipients.

Proposals to legislate legalization for childhood arrivals began with the bipartisan
DREAM Act in 2001, but the bill stalled in Congress for years. From 2009 to
2011 the Democrats controlled both houses of Congress and the presidency; they
could have passed the bill then, but didn’t. Pressed
by the “Dreamers”—young immigrant activists supporting the DREAM Act—in
June 2010, Schumer claimed that passing the bill would hurt the chances for
passing comprehensive immigration reform later. The Democrats finally
brought the DREAM Act up for a vote in December 2010. It passed the House,
but the Senate never voted. Supporters couldn’t come up with the 60 votes
necessary to block a filibuster by opponents. Three Republicans backed the
bill, but it was opposed by five Democrats: Max Baucus and John
Tester (MT), Kay Hagan (NC), Ben Nelson (NE), and Mark Pryor of (AR).

Photo: National Immigrant Youth Alliance/The Dream Is Now

Will Trump’s Base Desert Him?

Schumer
and Pelosi's claim that Trump was making a deal with them stirred outrage among
some of Trump’s loudest supporters. “Breitbart News called the president
‘Amnesty Don,’” Politico
reported. “Commentator Ann Coulter mused about impeaching Trump. And hard-line
immigration hawks in Congress like Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) called the contours
of the deal an ‘irreparable’ betrayal of Trump's base.”

But
it’s not clear that the far right was really breaking with Trump. It seems more
likely that people like Coulter are temporarily distancing themselves from the
president while stirring up their backers to help push for strong
anti-immigrant measures in any potential legislative compromise. A New
York Times op-ed by Eric Cantor,
a former House majority leader for the Republicans, suggests the latter course.
“It is well past time for Republicans to stand up to those on the right who are
quick to denounce any sensible solution as amnesty,” he wrote, “and for
Democrats to stand up to those on the left who rail against any meaningful
steps toward border security and immigration enforcement.”

In
other words, the Republicans can hold back the Breitbart types if the
Democrats agree to hold back pro-immigrant activists.

(People
might wonder why Cantor and Breitbart News see “amnesty” as a pejorative
term. This is a reference to the last major legalization of undocumented
immigrants, in 1986, which was widely referred to as an "amnesty." Ever since
then the right has claimed that the 1986 legalization caused the sharp increase
in unauthorized immigration during the 1990s. But there’s no evidence for the
claim. Asked to produce evidence, rightwingers generally refuse to answer;
an effort to cite the argument in a 2015 lawsuit was laughed out of court.
So “amnesty” as used by Cantor and Breitbart is simply a far-right
fantasy like “death
panels” and the threat of Sharia
law. Nevertheless, media like the New York Times still let it be employed in this sense.)

What Do the Dreamers
Say?
While reporting extensively on the reactions of
pundits and politicians, the media haven’t said much about the views of the
people actually affected—the DACA recipients themselves.

One exception was
NPR’s Morning
Edition on September 15. NPR correspondent Richard Gonzales reported on
interviews with Dreamers: “[T]hey don't
want a deal that would, let’s say, implement the E-Verify system, which
requires employers to check the legal status of people they hire. To the
Dreamers, that’s just another way of increasing the threat of deportation to
their undocumented parents. And they also don’t want a deal in which their DACA
status is a tradeoff for enhanced border security. That, they say, would
further what they consider the militarization of the border.” (Even in this
otherwise excellent report, Morning Edition host Mary Louise Kelly
persisted in using in the far right’s sense of “amnesty” as a pejorative term.)

Saturday, September 16, 2017

In
December 2014, the ACLU requested the full investigative files on complaints
filed by minors “in order to shed light on longstanding allegations of abusive
treatment of children by Border Patrol.” A year ago, after filing suit, the
ACLU began to receive thousands of pages of documents from the case files of
408 complaints filed from early 2009 through mid-2015…

By
John Carlos Frey and Brian Epstein, ABC News

September
14, 2017

Jahveel Ocampo. Photo: ABC News

In
December of 2009, 15-year old high school student Jahveel Ocampo, her boyfriend
and a few of his family members decided to drive east from Encinitas,
California, up into the mountains to see the first big snowfall of winter.

They
pulled over to a rest stop to use the bathroom and were suddenly blocked by an
unmarked truck. A man in a dark blue jacket shouted from the vehicle, Ocampo
would say later, directing her and her boyfriend to get out of the car with
their hands up.

Ocampo
says she had no idea what was happening – until the man asked her where she was
born. When she replied, “Tijuana,” she says the man demanded to know whether
she was an “illegal.”

He
slapped handcuffs on her and her boyfriend and within minutes they were
surrounded by several Border Patrol vehicles. Ocampo was separated from her
boyfriend, loaded into the back of a car and driven away.[…]

Thursday, September 14, 2017

The
AFL-CIO was one of the main supporters of employer sanctions back in 1986. It
only took 13 years for the labor federation to learn its lesson: in February
2000 it officially called for the elimination of the policy.

By
David L. Wilson, MR Online

September
13, 2017

It’s
now more than three decades since Congress created employer sanctions, a
feature of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act that imposes fines on
employers who hire undocumented workers. The measure’s proponents said the
sanctions would slow unauthorized immigration by removing the “job magnet”
thought to be drawing migrants to the United States. The House Education and
Labor Committee wrote at the time that by reducing the number of undocumented
workers the measure would limit “the depressing effect on working conditions
caused by their employment.”

If
that was the goal, employer sanctions have been a spectacular failure.[…]

Tuesday, September 12, 2017

The
"dreamers," young recipients of the Deferred Action for Childhood
Arrivals (DACA) program—are the true children of the North American Free Trade
Agreement (NAFTA). More than anyone, they have paid the price for the
agreement. Yet they are the ones punished by the administration of

Photo: David Bacon

President
Donald Trump, as it takes away their legal status, ability to work and right to
live in this country without fear of arrest or deportation. At the same time,
those responsible for the fact they grew up in the United States walk away
unpunished—and even better off.

I’m
not talking about their parents. It's common for liberal politicians—and even
Trump himself, on occasion—to say these young people shouldn't be punished for
the "crimes" of their parents, who brought their children with them
when they crossed the border without papers. But parents aren't criminals any
more than their children are. They chose survival over hunger, and sought to
keep their families together and give them a future.

The
perpetrators of the "crime" are those who wrote the trade treaties
and the economic reforms that made forced migration the only means for families
to survive. The "crime" was NAFTA.[…]

Monday, September 11, 2017

"We
deserve our share of the blame for not doing more to engage our members on
issues of racial justice and immigrant rights in recent decades. When we fail
to talk to our members about these issues, bigotry festers."

By
George Miranda, New York Daily News

September
9, 2017

Hundreds of immigrants are being deported
every day, and have been for years, but the impact hits home when it happens to
one of your own.

Over
the last two weeks, my union, the Teamsters, watched as one of our long-serving
members was taken from his family and deported. The experience was a wakeup
call that deportation can happen to any of our immigrant members or neighbors.

In
just 13 days, the family that Teamster member Eber Garcia Vasquez labored to
build and support over three decades was ripped apart.[…]

Saturday, September 9, 2017

On September 7 NBC News reported that Immigration and
Customs Enforcement (ICE) was planning to carry out “Operation Mega,” a
nationwide series of raids in the middle of the month targeting 8,400
immigrants. Soonafterwards, ICE announced it was cancelling the raids in
response to major hurricanes hitting the U.S.—although some speculate that the
real reason was the fact that the plan had been leaked. Was this a cancellation
or a postponement? Why was ICE planning the escalation? How do mass raids fit
in with Trump’s claim that DACA recipients don’t need to worry? And are we
ready to resist?—TPOI editor

Milwaukee Protest, February 2017. Photo: The Progressive

Homeland
Security Cancels Massive Roundups of Undocumented Immigrants

By Julia
Ainsley and Andrew Blankstein, NBC News

September 7, 2017

WASHINGTON —
President Donald Trump's Department of Homeland Security had planned nationwide
raids to target 8,400 undocumented immigrants later this month, according to
three law enforcement officials and an internal document that described the
plan as "the largest operation of its kind in the history of ICE," an
acronym for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

But after NBC
News reported the plans late Thursday, the agency issued a statement saying it
had cancelled nationwide enforcement actions due to Hurricane Irma and the
damage caused by Hurricane Harvey.[…]

AUSTIN, TX —
Immigrant advocates in Austin are demanding that U.S. Immigration and Customs
Enforcement (ICE) officials disclose details of the agency's planned
"mega-raid" designed to ensnare members of undocumented communities
nationwide for deportation.

On Thursday,
details emerged about the agency's "Operation Mega" initiative
targeting up to 10,000 undocumented immigrants nationwide. Sources suggested
the operation would intentionally target anyone in the country currently
undocumented.

Now, Austin
immigrant advocates are calling on ICE to release documents revealing the scope
of the operation.[…]

Horrific
Plan to Target 6,000 - 10,000 for Mass Deportation is Part of Escalating
Attacks on Immigrants

By
Detention Watch Network

September 7, 2017

Washington,
DC — Detention Watch Network (DWN), the National Immigrant Justice Center
(NIJC), National Immigration Law Center, United We Dream (UWD) and the Women’s
Refugee Commission (WRC) condemn Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE)
plan to conduct a nationwide immigration enforcement operation from mid- to
late-September. Multiple sources within and close to ICE have shared
information with advocates about the operation, which ICE is calling “Operation
Mega.” In addition to apprehending
targeted individuals prioritized in the president’s January 25 Executive Order,
ICE agents will apprehend undocumented or otherwise removable individuals
encountered during the operation, per ICE policy under the Trump
administration. These raids are intended to be historic in size, targeting
between 6,000 and 10,000 immigrants.

Operation
Mega is part of a wholesale and escalating attack on all immigrants. In the
wake of the end of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrival (DACA) program on
Tuesday, it is clear that this administration will not exercise restraint in
enacting an anti-immigrant and white supremacist agenda. In fact, earlier this
year, Trump’s top immigration agent declared that “no population is off the
table.”[…]

It
was before 6 a.m. on January 5, 2011 when Marlyn Gonzalez drove through
darkness and freezing cold into the parking lot of the commercial laundry where
she worked in Southampton, New York. After she dropped off her mother, who also
worked at Suffolk Laundry, and parked her car, Gonzalez was surprised to find
her manager, Rajindra Singh, waiting for her in the lot. When she tried to get
out of her car, Singh blocked her. He put his hand on Gonzalez’s knee, running
it all the way up to what she called her “intimate parts” and told her that he
wanted “to touch [her] pussy.”

Gonzalez
got away from Singh by telling him she had a boyfriend. She got to her
workstation at the laundry and began feeding sheets into a machine. “I was
shaking. I was very nervous. I felt my blood boiling,” she described in a later
testimony.

This
incident, which Marlyn Gonzalez recounted to me in an interview, was part of a
lawsuit brought in 2012 by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC),
suing Suffolk Laundry Services for a sexually hostile work environment and for
retaliation by management against all eight plaintiffs when they complained.
Suffolk denied both charges.[…]

Tom
Cat workers resisting the company's collaboration with a Trump administration
ICE audit are ready to launch the next phase of their campaign and they need
you to stand with them. Workers are demanding that Tom Cat a) pay dignified
severance so they can rebuild their lives and b) adopt an immigrant worker
protection policy for those who remain, which will serve as a model to other
employers in the Trump-era.

The
rally, hosted by Brandworkers, Immigrant Worker Justice, and the Food Chain
Workers Alliance, will be held Thursday, September 7, 12:30 pm - 1:30 pm. Meet
up at 51st Street and 7th Avenue in Manhattan.

Wednesday, September 6, 2017

As expected,
the Trump Administration announced on September 5 that it was rescinding the
five-year-old Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, with a
six-month delay before the cancellation takes full effect. President Trump
dodged making the announcement himself; he stuck Attorney General Jeff Sessions
with the job. And later in the day Trump seemed to contradict the announcement
with a tweet threatening to “revisit”
the issue in six months if Congress fails to put together some sort of DACA
replacement. What that meant was anybody’s guess.

What does it mean
for DACA Recipients?

Sessions’
official announcement was vague, but the administration clarified some points
during the day. No new DACA applications will be accepted, but people who have
already applied can expect their applications to be processed in the usual way.
Current recipients whose two-year deferrals and work authorizations are set to
expire before March 6, 2018, can apply to renew their deferrals and work
authorizations, but they must do so before October 5. Current recipients
whose deferrals expire on or after March 6 are simply out of luck.

In
public pronouncements the White House tried to make its approach sound humane,
but a talking
points memo the administration circulated in Congress on September 5 had
this chilling remark: “The Department of Homeland Security urges DACA
recipients to use the time remaining on their work authorizations to prepare
for and arrange their departure from the United States—including proactively
seeking travel documentation—or to apply for other immigration benefits for
which they may be eligible.”

According
to the memo, the total number of DACA recipients as of September 4 was 689,821,
somewhat lower than estimates in the media of about 800,000.

What Can We Expect
from Congress?

“Congress, get
ready to do your job - DACA!” Trump tweeted,
implying that Congress now had six months to find some legislative solution for
the hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants who came here as children.
In other words, he was calling for some version of the DREAM Act, a legislative
proposal that has been kicking around on Capitol Hill since 2001. It’s true
that the DREAM Act has bipartisan support, and the latest version might well
pass Congress if there was a straight up-and-down vote. But variousobservers
note that this hasn’t happened in the past 16 years—and the current session of
Congress has had a lot of trouble passing anything.

Some
Republicans will be pushing for a divide-and-conquer
strategy: they’ll back the DREAM Act in exchange for an agreement to
fund Trump’s border wall. But the Dreamers themselves seem to have no patience
for this sort of horse trading. “I’m not going to step on top of my community
to get ahead,” a DACA recipient protesting outside the White House told The
Daily Beaston September 5.

DACA protest at White House, September 5

What Is the
Resistance Doing?

Sessions’
September 5 announcement sparked
protests that day, including civil disobedience and arrests, throughout the
country. But what will the long-term response be?

Several
legal organizations have already started to challenge
the DACA cancellation in court, and at least three state government seem
ready to mount their own challenges. These would be unlikely to overturn the
White House’s decision, but they could delay implementation, just as the right
wing’s challenges to President Obama’s Deferred Action for Parental Accountability
(DAPA) tied the program up in court until Obama’s successor could repeal it.
Meanwhile, a number of organizations are gearing up to pressure Congress
with online
petitions calling for passage of the DREAM Act.

DACA recipients and their friends and families add up to a
substantial part of the population, and young Dreamers have been especially
forceful in the past as activists. Add to this their potential appeal to native-born
citizens. A Morning
Consult/Politico national tracking poll from August 31 to September 3
showed 58 percent of respondents supporting a path to citizenship for DACA
recipients, while another 18 percent felt the immigrant youths should be
allowed to become legal residents but not citizens. Only 15 percent wanted them
deported. In other words, like the ObamaCare “repeal and replace” effort, the
DACA cancellation is only popular with Trump’s hardcore base—and is extremely
unpopular with the great majority of the population.

One way to build on this potential support among the
native born would be to confront economic issues—especially the one often
misrepresented as “they take our jobs.” Although much anti-immigrant feeling is
simply racist and xenophobic, a good deal comes from native-born workers who
find their own wages held down because of lower pay for undocumented
immigrants. As a recent Economic Policy Institute (EPI) blog
post puts it, “The reasonable fear unauthorized workers feel keeps them
docile and quiet, which in turn diminishes the bargaining power of Americans
who work alongside unauthorized workers.” The corollary, rarely mentioned in
the media, is that providing authorization for undocumented workers raises
their pay and puts upward pressure on the pay of other workers in the
same fields.

A 2016 survey found that after receiving DACA protection,
including work authorization, recipients found their wages increasing by 42
percent on average. Other factors probably contributed to the wage increase, but the main
factor was certainly the DACA work authorization. So what happens when DACA
recipients are forced back into low-paying jobs in the informal economy? “Ending DACA and forcing these young
workers out of the formal, regulated labor market, thus making them easily
exploitable will not help American workers,” the EPI blog concludes. “[I]t will
do the opposite.”

Did Sessions Lie, or
Is He Just Clueless?

A
little more than two hours after Sessions’ September 5 briefing, Vox
posted an article entitled “4
lies Jeff Sessions told to justify ending DACA.” One of these was his claim
that DACA “among other things contributed to a surge of minors at the southern
border with humanitarian consequences,” a reference to an uptick in asylum
seekers from three Central American countries in the spring of 2014.

It is
well known that the principal cause for the uptick was a sharp increase in
crime in the three countries, but did DACA have anything to do with it? The Vox
article said there was “a lot of disagreement” on this but indicated that the
increase in asylum seekers was mostly due to “increasing violence and worsening
economic conditions in Central American countries.” PolitiFact found
Sessions’ claim “mostly
false.” Actually, it’s completely false.

Sessions
was repeating disinformation perpetrated by the right wing—including an office of the Border
Patrol—in the summer of 2014, disinformation that was never sufficiently debunked by the
corporate media. A leaked Border Patrol report about interviews agents
conducted with asylum seekers one day in May 2014 attributed the uptick to
“misrepresentations” about DACA. But someone also leaked the original
report about the interviews. This report showed clearly that any “pull” factor from
the United States for the uptick was the Trafficking Victims Protection
Reauthorization Act of 2008 (TVPRA), not DACA.

Sessions
probably wasn’t aware of any of this. He—or whoever wrote his statement—simply
didn’t know the facts and couldn’t be bothered to find out what they were.

Tuesday, September 5, 2017

Activists
have spent weeks coming up with emergency plans in case Trump eliminates or
cripple DACA, which would make 800,000 young immigrants vulnerable to
deportation. They’re now setting those plans into motion.

February student protest. Photo: Christopher Occhicone/NY Times

By
Jeff Stein, Vox

September
4, 2017

Monica
Camacho-Perez’s parents abandoned their home and family in Mexico and brought
her to the US when she was 7 years old.

Starting
Tuesday, she will camp outside the US Capitol and fast for four straight days
in the hope that doing so will help convince lawmakers to allow her to stay.

Monday, September 4, 2017

Multiplesources
report that President Trump on September 5 will probably announce the
cancellation of the popular Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA)
program, to take effect after a delay of six months. No one seems sure what the
six-month delay means; Vox’s Dara Lind analyzes the many
different possibilities and what they would mean for DACA recipients. Meanwhile, Trump would be sticking
Republicans in Congress with a hot
potato. Many of them want to pass some version of the old DREAM Act, in
effect granting legal status to the current DACA recipients. Other Republican
legislators are hoping to make a deal with Democrats to combine a DREAM Act
with funding for Trump’s border wall. And still others just want to deport as
many DACA recipients as possible and drive the rest into
the shadows.

Complicating
the GOP’s problems, the media are reporting that one of the victims of Hurricane Harvey was a
DACA recipient. Alonso Guillén had volunteered with a group
trying to help flood victims but drowned the night of August 29 during a rescue
attempt. The Border Patrol reportedly turned back his mother, who lives in
Mexico, when she tried to enter the U.S. to attend Guillén’s funeral.

A number of groups are working
on responses to Trump. Severalpetitionscalling for the defense
of DACA are already in circulation. Others are warning supporters not to fall
into the trap of defending immigrant youths by blaming
their parents for entering the country without authorization.

Movimiento Cosecha has announced a
nonviolent protest to “shut down Trump Tower” in New York on September 5 if the
president goes ahead with the cancellation announcement. The protest would
include “multiple direct actions, school walkouts, Trump Tower occupations,
street shutdowns, mass rallies,” according to the group’s Facebook page.

Sunday, September 3, 2017

One
of the four companies picked by the Trump administration this week for its
Mexico border wall prototype paid more than $3 million to settle a Justice
Department criminal investigation into whether it defrauded the U.S. government
through its participation in a federal “mentor-protégé” program to help
disadvantaged small business contractors, records show.

The
firm, Caddell Construction Company Inc., a major commercial and industrial
federal government construction contractor based in Montgomery, Alabama, did not
admit wrongdoing in the 2012 case.

But
it entered into a nonprosecution arrangement in which it agreed to pay $2
million and to provide unspecified cooperation with the federal government for
two years, Justice Department filings and news releases show. It paid the rest
of the money in what appears to be a related case, according to those documents
and information contained in the Federal Contractor Misconduct Database of the
Project on Government Oversight, an independent and nonpartisan group.[...]

Saturday, September 2, 2017

Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA)
is very much in the news this week. President Trump is expected to make
an announcement about the program on September 5. Nine rightwing state
attorney generals are planning to proceed
with a lawsuit against DACA on the same day (a tenth attorney general,
Tennessee’s Herbert Slatery III, pulled
out of the suit on September 1). Meanwhile, Republican
politicians are pushing Trump not to end the popular program. And DACA
beneficiaries and their supporters have already
started protesting any effort to cut the program back. But what is DACA?
How did it come about? And why are DACA recipients called “Dreamers”?

Here's what we
say in The Politics of Immigration: Questions and Answers, second
edition, Chapter 10, “Is
‘Deferred Action’ an amnesty program?” (Note: the last official number we had
for DACA recipients was
665,000 in 2015, but the figure has reportedly grown to nearly 800,000 now.)

In June 2012 President Barack Obama issued an
executive order granting “Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals” (DACA) to
undocumented young people who arrived in the United States before their
sixteenth birthdays. The move came after a decade of unsuccessful campaigning
for the DREAM Act (Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors), which
would have provided undocumented youth with a path to citizenship. DACA
provides no such path, but allows beneficiaries to avoid deportation and obtain
a work permit for a renewable two-year period. The applicant must have been
under the age of thirty-one on June 15, 2012; have lived here continuously
since at least June 15, 2007; and be in school, have graduated high school, or
have served in the military. […]

According to various estimates, some 1.2
million people were eligible for the original DACA program, although as of
March 31, 2015, only 665,000 people had their petitions approved. […]

[Executive orders like DACA] would benefit
millions of people, but they wouldn’t be amnesties. An actual amnesty would be
permanent and would have to be authorized by Congress. Deferred action is
simply a directive from the president for immigration officials to exercise
“prosecutorial discretion” by not deporting certain people. This is a
long-established practice in both criminal and immigration law where the
government chooses not to proceed with a case, often because of attenuating
circumstances. The president can decide to extend the policies after the
three-year limit, but can also simply end them, putting the beneficiaries back
in an “illegal” state, where they are subject to arrest, detention, and
deportation.

[We’re
occasionally posting excerpts from the new edition ofThe Politics of Immigration: Questions
and Answers. You can orderhereor from your favorite bookseller. For
more information on DACA, search here.]

Friday, September 1, 2017

Update [5:50 p.m.]: According to a family spokesperson,
Romulo Avelica-Gonzalez was released from Adelanto Detention Center at
approximately 5:20 p.m. and has been reunited with his family.

ICE arrested Avelica-Gonzales in February as his family watched.

After six months in the custody of federal immigration
authorities, Romulo
Avelica-Gonzalez was granted bond during a hearing on Wednesday morning and
is expected to be released tonight. Avelica-Gonzalez, who is originally from
Mexico, was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents while
dropping his daughters off at school in February. A video of the arrest
filmed by his sobbing, then-13-year-old daughter went viral, bringing
widespread attention to his case.[…]

Immigrants won a major victory Wednesday night when a
federal judge blocked Texas’s SB 4, the nation’s harshest anti–sanctuary cities
state law, from being implemented. In his 94-page
order, US District Judge Orlando Garcia issued a preliminary injunction of
key parts of the law, preventing them from going into effect while the legal
challenge winds its way through the courts. As the worst of Harvey was bearing
down on Texas this week, fears about the coming implementation of SB 4 fed
undocumented immigrants’ apprehension about seeking help during the storm. On
Monday, Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner pledged to personally represent any
person who was turned over to immigration authorities while seeking help during
Harvey. “I and others will be the first ones to stand with you,” Turner said.
“I don’t care what your status is. I do not want you to run the risk of losing
your life or a family member because you’re concerned about SB 4 or anything
else.” Despite his assurances, rumors that the City would check people’s
immigration statuses at shelters continued to spread, and the City had to
repeatedly quash them.[…]

About The Politics of Immigration

The Politics of Immigration: Questions and Answers is a book that goes beyond soundbites to tackle concerns about immigration in straightforward language and an accessible question-and-answer format. For immigrants and supporters, the book is a useful tool to confront stereotypes and disinformation. For those who are undecided about immigration, it lays out the facts and clear reasoning they need to develop an informed opinion. Ideal for classroom use, the updated and expanded 2017 edition provides a succinct overview of U.S. immigration history, policy, and practice, with detailed notes guiding readers toward further exploration.
Guskin and Wilson have written extensively on immigration and facilitated dozens of dialogues on the topic with students, community activists, congregations, and other public audiences. To arrange a dialogue or for more information, contact them at thepoliticsofimmigration@gmail.com.
To stay in the loop on author events and related resources, follow the book on Twitter (@Immigration_QA) and Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/ImmigrationQA/).